Reporting Services Programmability Enhancements
SQL Server 2005 introduces programmability enhancements to Reporting Services that are described below. Programmers who are familiar with Reporting Services can use this information to learn about changes to the Report Server Web services, major enhancements to the Reporting Services Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) provider, and new report viewer controls that ship in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. To read about the latest changes to the Report Definition Language (RDL), see Reporting Services Design-Time Enhancements.
New SOAP endpoints for the Report Server Web Service
SQL Server 2005 introduces two new endpoints for the Report Server Web service.
The Management Endpoint
The management endpoint of the Report Server Web service allows developers to programmatically manage objects on a report server. Methods exposed by the management endpoint are encapsulated in the ReportingService2005 class. Many of the classes and methods that were included in the previous version of the Report Server Web service are included in this new endpoint.
The Execution Endpoint
The execution endpoint of the Report Server Web service makes it easy for developers to exercise fine-grain, programmatic control over processing and rendering reports from a report server. The new endpoint includes classes and methods which existed in the previous version of the Report Server Web service that dealt with processing and rendering reports. In addition, a number of new classes and methods have been added to the Report Server Web service that are exposed through the execution endpoint. Existing processing methods were not migrated to the new management endpoint of the Report Server Web service, so new applications that need to process reports should be written against the execution endpoint of the Reporting Services Web service.
Methods for the Report Server Web service are encapsulated in the ReportExecutionService class. For more information on the Report Server Web service endpoints, please see Report Server Web Service Endpoints.
Revised WMI Provider
The Report Server Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) provider is a programmatic interface that allows you to configure the environment for a Reporting Services installation. You can use the WMI provider to build custom report server administration tools, or call it in scripts that you use to deploy a Reporting Services installation.
In this release of SQL Server 2005, the WMI provider includes new classes for retrieving more information about a Reporting Services, and new methods for configuring Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), creating report server roles and database in SQL Server, and reading and writing values to the configuration files.
New ReportViewer Controls in Visual Studio 2005
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 contains a set of freely distributable report viewer controls that make it easy to embed Reporting Services functionality into custom applications. The ReportViewer controls are intended for developers who want to provide predesigned, fully authored reports as part of an application feature set (for example, a Web site management application might include reports that show click-stream analysis on company Web sites). Embedding the controls in an application provides a streamlined alternative to including the Reporting Services server components in your application deployment. The controls provide report functionality, but without the additional report authoring, publication, or distribution and delivery support that you find in Reporting Services.
There are two versions of the ReportViewer controls, one for rich Windows client applications and one for ASP.NET applications. The controls support both local processing and remote processing modes. In local processing mode, your application provides the report definition and datasets and triggers report processing. In remote processing mode, data retrieval and report processing happen on the report server and the control is used for display and report navigation. This model allows you to build rich applications that can be scaled from desktop to the enterprise.
ReportViewer controls are documented in Visual Studio 2005 online Help. For more information, see the Visual Studio 2005 product documentation.
See Also
Concepts
Reporting Services Enhancements
Other Resources
Report Server Web Service
Introducing Reporting Services Programming
Reporting Services WMI Provider
SQL Server Reporting Services